Self care

Supporting people to take responsibility for their own health and well being

We have tools that can help you to support a person to self care.

What is self care?

Self care is about everyone taking responsibility for their own health and wellbeing. This includes keeping both the body and mind fit and healthy.

What does self care do?

Self care can help prevent illness and accidents and if a person does become ill, have a long term condition or disability; it can help them to take care of themselves better.

Supporting someone to self care

You can support a person to make their own choices about what they want and need to keep fit and healthy. This is done by understanding that they know best what is right for them and letting them make their own decisions about how they live their lives.

Common core principles to support self care

With Skills for Health we have developed the common core principle for self care.

You can use these tools to gain the skills, knowledge and confidence to help put the person you are supporting at the centre of the planning process and helping them to make their own choices and decisions.

The benefits of self care

For a person

There are many benefits of self care for people who live with a long term condition, illness or disability, as well as carers. They can suffer less pain, anxiety, depression and fatigue, have a better quality of life, be more active and independent and live longer.

For the adult social care sector

As well as giving individuals the power to make their own choices and decisions there are other benefits for adult social care.

Self care is based on person-centred care, respect, dignity, choice and independence. If your organisation provides care, self care can help promote and develop quality care and support.

Self care allows people to think differently about how care is provided. If you commission services, lead service or workforce development, self care encourages innovation and supports the move to more integrated care and support.

The risk of self neglect

Self neglect is a behavioural condition in which a person neglects their basic needs such as personal hygiene and eating. There are three main forms of self neglect:

Lack of self-care - this includes neglect of someone’s personal hygiene, nutrition and hydration, or health, to an extent that may endanger safety or well-being.

Lack of care of a person's environment - this includes situations that may lead to domestic squalor or increased risk in the domestic environment.

Refusal of services - this might include refusal of care services in either their home or a care environment or of health assessments or interventions, even if previously agreed, which could potentially improve self-care or care of a person's environment.

We are exploring how self-neglect can impact on people’s care and support needs and how the workforce has to adapt to meet the challenges that self-neglect can present.

Supporting people who need care and support to take informed risks

Providing real choice and control for people means supporting them to take the risks they choose, particularly in the use of self-directed support and personal budgets.

We have developed several resources for you to use to support the learning and development of your staff to help them to balance risk enablement with their professional duty of care and to take a person-centred approach to risk.

We have developed ‘learning to live with risk’ guides to help you develop an appropriate risk policy that will be the cornerstone for supporting both staff and people who need care and support.

We have also developed ‘Keeping risks person centred’ guides to help people and those who care about them most think in positive and productive ways about how to ensure that they can achieve the changes they want to see, while keeping the issue of risk in its place.